What is Web tracking, why it matters, and what to do about it.
The 10,000 foot view
Privacy is a fundamental right.
The Web's (current) business model is advertising.
Advertising calls for collecting everything, always, forever.
The Internet is a surveillance state.
Bruce Schneier, security and privacy expert
What is Web tracking?
Web tracking is collecting everything you do online.
Trackers are parts of pages you visit.
For example, Facebook Like buttons.
If you click the button, we can call that "active" tracking.
If you don't, you still get tracked. Let's call that "passive" tracking.
Facebook Likes can be used to automatically and accurately predict a range of highly sensitive personal attributes including: sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious and political views, personality traits, intelligence, happiness, use of addictive substances, parental separation, age, and gender.
Private traits and attributes are predictable from digital records of human behavior, 2012 University of Cambridge study
What gets passively tracked?
The page you are on
Your browser/computer info (screen size, plugins, OS version, fonts, ...)
Your approximate location (from IP address)
Anything previously stored by the tracker's domain on your computer (cookies, for example)